In case you missed it, the Syfy Channel aired an hour-long episode of its popular Ghost Hunters television program Wednesday night devoted to an investigation of claims that the Rundel Memorial Building on South Avenue is populated by otherworldly beings.

The TV ghost hunters were summoned by the Rochester Public Library itself after years of reports from staff members of things going bump in the night – shadowy figures appearing in the stacks after hours, odd sounds in supposedly unoccupied rooms, doors opening and closing for no apparent reason. A surveillance camera caught a heavy wooden door opening unaided by human hands in the dark of one night.

“It’s not a hoax. None of this was made up. We been hearing these stories for years,” said Christine Ridarsky, the Rochester city historian who works in the Rundel building and had a star turn as library spokeswoman in the Ghost Hunters episode. “As the historian, people would sometimes come to me and say ‘Do you know anything about people who died in this building, because we keep seeing things.’”

So with tounges only partly in cheeks, library officials contacted the spectral watchdogs and invited them to poke around. The crew, including six on-air investigators, spent two nights at the 76-year-old building on South Avenue this August.

The ensuing episode –”Due Date with Death,” they called it — debuted Wednesday evening and proved longer on drama than anything else. There was a lot of creeping around dark rooms with low-light cameras and startled hunters whispering to each other things like “Whoa, did you hear that?”

Hokum? Some would think so. But not everybody, judging by the popularity of the show.

As the episode progressed, there was considerable discussion of two people whose deaths were connected to the library. One was a former long-time librarian, Frank, who died shortly after suffering a heart attack in the building. The other was a woman named Laura Young, whose body was found one morning in 1902 in the mill race atop which the library was later built. Her death may have been an accident, a suicide — or a murder. (The fine Rochester Subway blog offers an account of that case.)

The theory was that Frank returns to Rundel in spirit form at night to walk the stacks and reshelve books. As for Mrs. Young, she could be “reaching out to us to help solve her case after all these years,” as Ridarsky put it.

The hunters spent a fair amount of time in the library calling out for Frank and Mrs. Young. Alas, neither responded.

As they went, the crew seemed to debunk the unaided door-opening by demonstrating that wind coming through an open window can blow the door open. And they suggested that ghostly shadows in the first floor may be caused by patrons of the ever-busy Dinosaur Bar-B-Que just across the street.

But the intrepid hunters did capture on video what they claimed was a shadowy torso peeking around a corner in the basement stacks, and got footage of a door closing without a human seeming to touch it. They also made several audio recordings of mysterious noises, including a voice seeming to utter a phrase.

“I couldn’t make it out,” said Ridarsky, who reviewed the team’s findings on camera at the end of the episode. “But it clearly was a voice. Did it come from a ghost or someone outside at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que yelling loudly. Who knows?”

Ridarsky, who’s a former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, said she’s a skeptic about these things. But still … she found the door closing by itself kind of hard to explain, and also noted that when the library surveillance camera caught that other door opening, the windows in question were closed.

So there.

In their wrap-up, the hunters said there did appear to be unexplained apparitions in Rundel but they didn’t appear to be malicious. So, the suggestion was, just keep your eyes open and enjoy the supernatural ride.

That’s just what the folks at Rundel intend to do. The Syfy crew left open the possibility that they’ll return for more sleuthing but, as Ridarsky noted, there are home-grown ghost hunters as well.

“We’re thinking we might invite some local folks in and do some more investigating,” she said. (Local paranormal probers are invited to contact library system assistant director Sally Snow if they’re interested.)

Rundel also will be getting a tape of the episode and may do a public viewing of “Due Date with Death” in the library itself. “And who knows? Maybe at some point we’ll have lock-ins,” Ridarsky said.

Perhaps there’s some money in it for the public library — say, a fee for anyone who wants to spend a night looking for spooks in the stacks – but even if not, Ridarsky said the Ghost Hunters episode is a good thing for Rundel.

“We’re having a lot of fun,” she said. “I love that the whole community is buzzing about our library.”

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Gary Craig was previously a reporter with the now-defunct Rochester Times-Union, where he covered City Hall and politics. His focus for much of the past decade has been on criminal justice issues. He has won regional, state and national journalism awards, including honors from Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Headliners Awards. His career has taken him to prison riots, national political conventions, and the cockpit of a biplane flying upside down over the Chesapeake Bay. Few of those moments were as memorable as one of his early days at his first newspaper, the Farmville (Va) Herald, a day in which he covered both a chicken house fire and the birth of twin calves. He and his wife, Charlotte, live in Brighton and are the parents of two daughters, neither of whom showed the least bit of interest in journalism as a career.

Sean Lahman is the Democrat and Chronicle’s database specialist. Prior to joining the staff, he was a reporter with the New York Sun, and served as an editor of a number of best-selling sports encyclopedias – including Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball and The ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia. Lahman’s 2008 book, The Pro Football Historical Abstract, was called "the best football book of the decade" by the Pro Football Researchers Association. He is perhaps best known for creating the popular Lahman Baseball database, an open source collection of baseball statistics. Lahman attended the University of Cincinnati and lives in Irondequoit. In lieu of hobbies, he has three teenage kids.

Meaghan McDermott has been with the Democrat and Chronicle since 1998, and has come close to reaching her one-time goal of being assigned as a beat reporter to cover each of Monroe County's suburban towns and villages.
Since 2006, her focus has been on the Town of Greece and the Greece Central School District. Her work there, including reporting on financial waste and abuse in an early 2000s schools construction project and corruption in the Greece Police Department, has been recognized with state journalism awards. Over the years, she's also looked into topics such as into the safety conditions of local roadway bridges, school superintendent salaries and perks, teacher pay, teacher discipline, town and village employee pay and overtime and how a spree killer ended up with a pistol permit despite his prior arrests.

Dick Moss is investigations editor at the Democrat and Chronicle and his duties include guiding the public service investigations team. Moss has bounced around among half a dozen editing jobs at the Democrat and Chronicle since 1987, when he started in Rochester as a copy editor. His longest stint was as the newsroom's copy desk chief from 1996 to 2005. He is a 1980 graduate of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. -- where he studied under muckraking journalist Clark Mollenhoff -- and worked as a reporter and editor at several smaller newspapers in Virginia and New York state before joining the Democrat and Chronicle. His academic degrees include a diploma from the Beehive Kindergarten in Flushing, N.Y., that claims he plays well with others. "The sandbox was my favorite playtime activity," Moss says. "I've enjoyed digging in the dirt ever since."

Steve Orr has been a reporter at the Democrat and Chronicle since 1981, and has covered a wide variety of local topics. Over the years he also has looked into, among other things, chemical contamination at the former Kodak Park, sewer tunnel construction snafus, airport construction issues, baseball-stadium construction problems, the troubled life of a man accused of impregnating a comatose nursing home patient, the troubled life and death of a suspected serial killer, railroad crossing safety, the death of a troubled loner while under government care, suburban development trends, crime trends, a suburban property scam, an rigged appraisal-assessment scam, and a scam to cheat institutions out of millions of dollars in nickels, dimes and quarters. He originated the newspaper's computer and Internet column and wrote it weekly for a decade, and also is a former weather and climate columnist. At present Orr focuses on environmental issues. Contact: E-mail | Phone (585) 258-2386 | Twitter.com/SOrr1 | Facebook.com/SteveOrrROC

David Riley joined the Democrat and Chronicle’s watchdog team in 2013. An upstate New York native, he has worked as a journalist for a decade from the Hudson Valley to Greater Boston. Most recently, he was a regional reporter and editor for GateHouse Media in eastern Massachusetts, where he focused on data-driven reporting and wrote stories about everything from state government to the Boston Marathon bombing. He has won regional journalism awards for his coverage of police cameras that scan license plates, river pollution and rapid development in a small town, among other topics. In pursuit of stories over the years, he has attempted to shoot video while riding a bike, fled swarming bees and has been asked to leave numerous parking lots. A SUNY Albany graduate, he lives in Rochester with his wife.